My Broadband woes

[maltrab]

Late last year after battling with BT for some weeks I moved provider, the Problem I had with BT was although I was paying them for the 80/20 service I had noticed my download speed was being capped, instead of 80 down it was capped at 65 so I ended up with around 55 down, my router clearly showed my line would support over 100 down, no matter how many times I called BT the answer was there was nothing they could do about it, I had also read on various forums that I was not alone in having this issue, and it seems it was restricting my speeds by stealth.

Fortunately for me a fews weeks after this started to happen my contract was up, so I decided to jump ship, but where to go, the likes of all the other well known providers all had issues, so after some research on www.thinkbroadband.com I decided to try idnet, the price was competitive but the main draw other than excellent reviews is it is only a 1 month contract.

Once I was connected to idnet I could see my profile was still capped, so after a quick chat with their tech support, they got onto the case with BT wholesale and in 48 hours it was reset to what it should of been and has been rock solid ever since.

The only thing I would point out to anyone who thinks of moving to idnet, you need your own router as they do not ship out these cheap and nasty ones that most providers send for postage cost, idnet can provide routers they recommend for a cost or you could buy a decent one yourself from around £50

I did worry though that after 6 weeks of being with idnet I had a email saying there had been a price change for my service, I though here we go only been with them a few weeks and the price has changed, it had they had reduced it by £1.50p a month

 

[captain clutterbuck]

I use Virgin because of the throughput levels with a fibre feed although what they don't tell you its fibre to the wall and good old Coax to the router reducing the throughput . I had issues with signal strength so had to get an Engineer from Virgin to come out and test and he has now fitted a booster to resolve . If I have issues I use a tool called Pingplotter to test the network as you can set a packet size , frequency and the tool sends an ICMP packet to each router in the hop to the destination [some have 100% fail in the core of the network because they drop ICMP but the edge routers do respond ] . So I set up the trace to say Google's IP address [it allows you to put in www.google.co.uk or any other site and it resolves to its IP address] and the tool records the response time and any drops it gets from all the routers in the network between my laptop and the destination .

You can save the graphed information and the statistics which on a few occasions I have sent to Virgin as evidence .It has paid dividends in the past because it proved that the next hop area router from my home was seriously underpowered and they agreed to swap out and on a couple of occasions it has encouraged them to give me a couple of months free for my trouble . The tool is purely testing network responses there is no load factor in terms of HTML pages being pushed down or retrieved .

 

[Roger]

I pay £22 per month with Plusnet and get 36meg download speed. Just checked my address on idnet and they offer 50meg but charge a £90 setup fee plus £42.20 per month. I think I'll stay with Plusnet but I think the prices depend on where you live and how far you are from the exchange so it may be cheaper for other people.

 

[Barrychuckle]

BT are consistantly voted one of the worst UK companies by Which? year in and year out. I moved away from BT as their customer service is absolutely atrotious. I'm with Plusnet now, sadly they are also owned by BT, but at least all their helplines are in the UK, which makes understanding their operatives easier.

 

[maltrab]

My router keep a good track on what is happening on my circuit including SNR changes, the other advantage of using this router once you pass the initial cost of buying it, prices start from £90, you can make very cheap telephone calls, over the last few years my call cost has been around £25 a year and I make a lot of calls inc some overseas, a couple of pictures of details supplied by the router, you will only get this info if the router is direct to your line, friend who use FTTP and virgin, still save a fortune on calls, but don't get the line info. You can also get a free second telephone number if it would come in handy.